Has anyone tried going to udev-182 on ppc32 (e.g., Mac G3 or G4)? Specifically, has anyone used udev-182 with an initramfs generated by genkernel and booted with yaboot?

Does anyone know if yaboot will truly not handle compressed initramfs? I read someone's rant saying it does not, while I believe I read in the yaboot documentation that yaboot uses the kernel to uncompress such things. (I can find the links to these if anyone wants.) Currently, that is one of the things I need to know for certain. Of course, it would be nice to know if udev-182 works at all on ppc32.

BACKGROUND

I didn't have any problems following the various guides to making an initramfs on x86 and x86_64, but when I tried making an initramfs with genkernel and using that on a Mac G4 (ppc32) with the new udev-182-r3 it failed, I believe because /usr was not mounted by initramfs. Specifically, I have been running the gentoo 3.3.2 kernel with the DEVTMP stuff, yaboot-1.3.16, and udev-171-r5 for awhile without any problem. I then generated an initramfs with genkernel-3.4.30 and added it to yaboot.conf, did a ybin -v and rebooted. No problem. I could not tell for sure if it was using the initramfs, but it didn't complain about it, so I figured I was ready to try udev-182. Unfortunately, that seems to fail to mount /usr properly and since I have a separate /usr, /, /var, /boot, etc., I now get dumped into a pretty unusable state. Luckily, only some of the volumes are on LVM (pretty much those from the Gentoo LVM2 guide), so I am not completely hosed. I have my ppc32 set up just like by x86, x86_64 machines, so I was surprised it failed so badly.

Thanks, NeddySeagoon. I looked over your guide. I have nothing against rolling all this stuff manually, but I thought that since (1) the gentoo news item on the pending udev update mentions both dracut and genkernel, and (2) the official handbooks have supposedly been updated and only mention genkernel, that genkernel should work. As mentioned, in my experiments with x86 and x86_64, genkernel does appear to automatically mount /usr (though I couldn't find any documentation in genkernel on how to mount anything else), and it does handle lvm. I would prefer to use a solution that automates as much as possible (like genkernel or dracut), as I have multiple machines to maintain. Do you know if gentoo is working towards a somewhat more automated solution (e.g., more options to genkernel)? Kind of like we don't build starting with stage1 anymore? If not, then I guess it's just roll your own...

I would still like to get comments from anyone specific to the questions I originally asked, which was only ppc32 related.

Just to a quick look at the genkernel source and following get_mounts_list() I see you can specify the systems you want mounted before init in /etc/initramfs.mounts. I never saw that documented anywhere, but it looks like exactly what I need to get /var mounting from LVM just as it currently does it for mounting /usr on LVM. In short, for my user case, it looks like using genkernel to build an initramfs gives me everything I need in an automated way...at least for x86 and x86_64. I am still suspicious about using it on ppc32 since doing the exact same thing that work on x86 with genkernel does seem to fail on ppc32. Anyone else tried genkernel on ppc32 to test the new udev-182?

I'm using udev-182, but I've always used a single / partition without separate /var or /usr, so I still don't need an initramfs. Unless you have a burning need to use a different partition for /usr or /var, for simplicity, I'd recommend keeping them on the same partition. It's just less trouble!

so it appears yaboot is seeing initramfs. (Maybe this is new with sys-kernel/genkernel-3.4.30?) When I compare with a ppc without initramfs in /etc/yaboot.conf, I do not see such a message. Is there some log that gives better insight into what happens during the yaboot -> initramfs -> regular root period? Outside of these two lines, II don't see any sign of what is going on. Going to the console is pretty inconvenient, and moves by too fast most of the time anyway, even with Ctrl-s/Ctrl-q.